tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 21 19:40:09 2001

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QAO (was: I had an idea, I don't know how...)

>One of the objections to QAO is that the two sentences don't quite match 
>each other.  An English speaker would not accept "I cannot explain 'why has 
>he stopped?'"  I cannot explain the REASON he has stopped, not why has he 
>stopped?  (Notice how that last sentence makes no sense?)  As far as makes 
>sense to me, the object sentence cannot be a question.

Apples and oranges.  Klingon is not English, and there are natural languages 
where such a construction is perfectly valid.

Finnish:
Miksi hän on lakannut?  En osaa selittää miksi hän on lakannut.

Spanish:
Porque el a parado?  No puedo explicar porque el a parado.

Admittedly, these examples don't have the quotes of your English example, 
but the ordinary sentence-as-object in Klingon doesn't either.  And you can 
say: I cannot explain why he has stopped, where the only difference between 
the dependant clause and an independent question is the verb inversion.  And 
in Klingon, the word order would be the same.

In yes/no sentences, {-'a'} is just a type 9 suffix.  Sentences with other 
type 9 suffixes can appear in a sentence-as-object.  What's shouldn't 
{-'a'}?  In other questions, question words are simply substituting for 
other words.  If you deny them, shouldn't you also deny any sentences that 
contain pronouns or {Dochvam} or other words that replace words in 
sentences?

I'm not saying that question-as-object is valid.  I'm also not saying that 
it's not.  Only Okrand can answer that question.  What I'm saying is that 
this particular reason doesn't seem linguistically valid.  A question is 
simply a sentence, and we know that {'e'} connects two sentences, so there's 
no reason to consider it ungrammatical ... although you don't have to use 
it, or even like it, if it doesn't feel right to you.

Now, I could see the problem if the English sentences had different tenses, 
but that's because you can't do that with sentence-as-object, either.  "At 
first, I thought he was wrong, but now I think he was right."  How would you 
say that in Klingon?  In TKD, Okrand says "the past tense of the translation 
comes from the verb in the first sentence" (p.66), and the second sentence 
cannot have an aspect marker.  So the second half of the above senetnce 
would be impossible without some fiddling around.  "...now I think (present 
tense) that he was (past tense) right."  But's that's a completely different 
issue.

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